Night Moves

Eddie Muller and Ben Mankiewicz hosted a TCM spotlight back in July on neo-noirs, movies from after the end of the traditional noir cycle that have a lot of the thematic elements of noir, minus the shadowy black-and-white photography. I did a post on Blood Simple several weeks back that I think was part of the spotlight. Recently, I watched another of the movies I had recorded during the spotlight, Night Moves.

Gene Hackman plays Harry Moseby, a former pro football player who, having to find work after his playing days, became one of those private detectives involved in cheap, tawdry cases like staking out straying spouses in divorce cases. Worse, he finds himself staking out his own wife Ellen (Susan Clark), who is having an affair with Marty (Harris Yulin). That's a subplot that underlies the rest of the movie, although as you might guess from the main character being a detective, we're about to get a mystery.

The mystery comes when Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) contacts Harry. Arlene is a twice-divorced woman, with a daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith) by her first husband, who has since died. Arlene was one of those actresses who never quite hit the big time, married a producer, and retired from acting before the divorce. So when the first husband died, he left all the money to Delly in a trust fund. Arlene only gets to administer the fund as long as she's got custody of Delly and Delly is living with her.

And there's the problem. Delly has up and run away, and Arlene wants to find her. Not that Arlene has told Harry the whole truth, of course; just the part about Delly running away. So Harry dutifully gets a list of contacts who might know where Delly is, starting with Delly's sort-of boyfriend Quentin (James Woods). He's a mechanic who looks like he got into a fight recently, which he did, with a man on the set of a movie in New Mexico who put the moves on Delly and had been romantically involved with Arlene. It's on the set of the movie in New Mexico that Harry meets Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns), a stunt coordinator who befriends Harry and is even willing to offer him a job should Harry want out of the detective business.

Ah, but Delly isn't in any of these places. Thankfully, Harry is able to determine that Arlene's second husband (and Delly's stepfather), Tom Iverson (John Crawford), is in the Florida Keys, where he runs some sort of Z-grade Sea World type place, together with his girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren). There's a good chance Delly might have gone to Florida to see her stepfather, so Harry goes there. Sure enough, Delly is in Florida. He's able to bring her back to California, but only after a traumatic incident in which Delly finds a submerged airplane with the pilot still dead inside.

Now, since we're only about an hour into the movie, you know that they're not all going to live happily ever after. Harry is still trying to deal with his failing marriage, while one night at the office he starts listening to his answering machine messages and finds one from Delly wanting to talk to him. However, before he can do so, he learns that she's been killed. Harry wonders if the answer to the killing might still be found in Florida....

One of the comments Eddie Muller made in the wraparounds as part of the spotlight is that in a detective noir, the story is usually really more about the detective than it is about the actual mystery. I think he's quite right here. There's not much mystery to where Delly is, and after she's killed, there's only about another 20 minutes to wrap up the rest of the action, so nuch much time to delve into the second mystery. And if it weren't about the detective, I don't think we'd get the whole fairly substantial subplot about Harry's wife and her affair.

So if you're looking for a good mystery, I don't think you're really going to find it in Night Moves. If, however, you're looking for something that's more of a character study, you'll get it, thanks to another solid performance from Hackman and able support from all of the other actors. The locations, despite the Florida Keys setting, are suitably inglamorous, as befits people who are in many ways on the B-list of society, if that. Also in the film's favor is that, with the destruction of the Production Code several years earlier, movies could be more explicit in dealing with subject matter like infidelity and murder.

Night Moves isn't a perfect movie, but it's well made and definitely worth a watch.

The Chase

Today's star in TCM's Star of the Month is Robert Redford, which means somewhat more recent movies than most stars' days, since Reford only started in the 1960s. His day concludes overnight tonight or early tomorrow at 3:30 AM with The Chase. I had recorded it some time before when it ran on TCM, so seeing it come up on the scheudule, I watched it to do a post on it.

Redford plays Bubber Reeves, who lived in a small town in Texas before being sent to prison. But he and another inmate break out of prison. To further their escape, they flag down a car presumably to carjack it and drive to points unknown, but the other prisoner kills the driver with a rock and drives off, leaving Bubber holding the bag and knowing everybody will suspect him without an alibi.

Word reaches his home town that Bubber has escaped from prison, and Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando), one of the few people in town who's truly sympathetic to him, expects along with everyboy else in town that Bubber is going to try to come back as his wife Anna (Jane Fonda) still lives here.

Unfortunately, Bubber comes from a town that's a lot like the one in Violent Saturday, at least in the sense that almost everybody seems to have some sort of secret that threatens to turn the movie into a potboiler. Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall) owns the local bank and a lot of townsfolk think he's installed Sheriff Calder in order to have a toady to deal with any possible legal problems. Val's son Jason (James Fox) has having an affair with Anna while Bubber was in prison. Bubber's mom (Miriam Hopkins) thinks she's responsible for Bubber turning out the way he did. And on, and on, and on.

Sure enough, Bubber is trying to get home, likely to see Anna. Lester, an otherwise innocent black man, tries to go up the back way to Anna's apartment to give her a message about Bubber's whereabouts, and this benig a small southern town, there are a lot of people who would be happy enough to play the race card to try to get him to reveal where Bubber is. Heck, they'll be just as happy to beat the crap out of the sheriff to get the information. Can Calder keep the peace?

The Chase is based on a play by Horton Foote, who wrote the plays that served as the basis for some other movies that I really liked, such as The Trip to Bountiful, as well as screenplays like Tender Mercies. The Chase, however, has some serious problems. The whole thing seemed terribly unrealistic, as though Foote was trying to cram in as many thought-provoking plot points as he could. This also causes the movie to run about 135 minutes, when it really needed some trimming to get down to under two hours.

The acting, however, is pretty good, and I am for the most part not a particularly big fan of Marlon Brando. A couple of people I haven't mentioned yet are Robert Duvall as one of Rogers' employees, and Angie Dickinson as the sheriff's wife. The script, while having problems, doesn't really plum the overheated depths of Southern Gothic that films based on Tennessee Williams works do, such as The Fugitive Kind.

So watch and judge for yourself. While I and any number of other reviewers have problems with The Chase, there are also a lot of reviewers who really like it.